If content is “king”, then linked content is the empire. Writing words for your site – even if it’s the best prose ever constructed – -easy to scan, benefits-rich, with the perfect call to action…can only get you so far. As someone who has written copy for over 200 websites in the past few years, I’ve seen it all: poor design, great design; bad content, great content; poor attempts at conversion, and conversion machines; non-linked content and yes, link friendly content.

Lets face it; this recession is tough for everyone. We are all searching for strategies we can use to not only survive – but thrive, despite the economy. At the end of the day, you have to do a lot of things right in order to have your content found on the web and to convert visitors, as I discuss in my book, Content Rich: Writing your Way to Wealth on the Web. But of all the things I mentioned there, link friendly content, or content that naturally attracts links, is the most important – by far. How do we know? Because Google tells us it is…

In Google’s Webmaster Guidelines they say, “Give visitors the information they’re looking for – Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.”

They go on to say, “Make sure that other sites link to yours – Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page’s importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search.”

Off-Page Optimization

Many people refer to links and link building as “Off Page Optimization” (OPO). Wikipedia explains it well by expressing that OPO involves “strategies for search engine optimization that are done off the pages of a website to maximize its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the page content. Examples of off-page optimization include linking and placing keywords within link anchor text. Methods of obtaining links can also be considered off-page optimization.” These include:

* Public relations
* Article distribution
* Social networking via sites like Digg and Slashdot
* Link campaigns, such as asking complementary businesses to provide links
* Directory listings
* Link exchanges
* Three-way linking
* One-way linking
* Blogging
* Forum posting
* Multiway linking

I would provide a little editorializing by saying that the type of link building I’m referring to, creating link friendly content, deals mainly with on-page optimization, in other words, right on the pages of your site. But looking at the off page factors are important as well.

The Link Building Experts Speak…
It’s important to also know what the most noted link experts in the search marketing space have said in regards to link friendly content…

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